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SEO (search engine optimization) has been one of the most
important buzz words for web publishers over the past 10
years. Getting ranked in Google means free traffic for web
publishers, so improving and optimizing a given website for the
search engines was essential. However, Google Panda is here
to stay, and it has forever changed the rules of SEO.

For the past 10+ years, Google utilized its PageRank methodology
to rank websites. If you had a website about basketball, and you
got a link from ESPN.com – Google would notice that your site is
a quality site about basketball. It was similar to a voting
system, when a relevant and high authority site linked to you, it
would count as a vote. And the more votes your website
received, the better your website would rank. Of course
relevance played a roll, as Google gave more value to sites
linking to you which were about a similar topic as yours.
In addition, authority mattered, so one link from ESPN.com may
hold more value than 5 links from sports related blogs which
weren’t as popular.

Two other major factors that Google considered were unique
content and the "Title Tag". Google wanted content that was
unique and not displayed on other web pages across the
internet. If duplicate content was found, Google would
determine which site was the original author of the content, and
it would penalize the other sites which had scraped the content.

Google also factored the "Title Tag" as it was a way for web
publishers to tell users and Google what the given webpage was
about. This helped Google to organize and rank web pages
for given keyword searches.

This methodology for ranking web pages worked, and Google
utilized the above methods in addition to several others to
display highly relevant search results. For years, Google
results were of a higher quality than all other search engines,
which is why Google continued to command over a 65% market
share. However, over the past few years, other search
engines such as Bing caught up, and Google wasn't so special
anymore. At the same time, web publishers became savvy and
they figured out ways to sneak into Google ahead of more relevant
results. For example, earlier this year, JC Penny was accused of purchasing
links on websites across the web to make Google think that these
links were natural and thus a vote for JC Penny's websites.

As more and more users complained about search results, Google
realized it needed to shift, and in came Google
Panda. Google Panda is an entirely new way for Google to
evaluate websites. And while Google will still factor in
many of the same criteria it has in the past, Google Panda adds
an entirely new element to Google's ranking methodology.

Panda wants better quality websites in its results. It is
less concerned with signals that other websites give it and more
concerned with what the actual users think about the
website. Think of Google Panda as an automated way for
Google to have users power its search results. The
brilliant part is that it is user powered without the user having
to do anything different. Panda is not only genius, but it
makes sense as it should prevent lower quality sites from
tricking Google into thinking they are of higher quality.

Panda factors in a wide variety of user signals to help Google
determine the quality of a website. It looks at "Time on
Site" as a way to determine how quality of an experience the user
is having on a given site. It looks at the bounce rate,
which is a measure of the percentage of people that leave a site
without doing anything. It looks at social signals such as
shares and +1's as a way to see if people are recommending a
given webpage. It looks at page views per visit as a way to
see how people are navigating through a given site.

Google also looks at Branded Search traffic which is the amount
of people that are specifically looking for a given site. So, if
your basketball site is called "Fun Basketball Dude" - and Google
notices that an increasing amount of people are searching for
"Fun Basketball Dude" as a way to get to your website, that is a
way for Google to recognize that your site is enjoyed by
users.

Overall, these are "usage metrics" and they signal to Google how
users value a particular webpage or website. In the old
days, unique content was important, but Google Panda wants unique
content that is also high quality content. And the usage
metrics Google has in place will help it to determine if the
content that the reader lands on is truly high in quality.

If you are trying to rank well in Google - I think you should
listen to what Google is saying. Instead of trying to trick
Google with Black Hat techniques, utilize Google's tips which
will essentially improve your site while boosting your chance at
increased referral traffic from Google.